An early season harvest

Arugula, planted seven weeks earlier

Today we had a big work day, planting many of the hot-weather crops.  We also had our first little harvest of the season.  The arugula here is starting to bolt so we harvested all stems and maybe 1/3 of the leaves.  I expect this bunch to be done in a couple of weeks, but we can stave off the bolting for a few more harvests.  We also harvested some spinach, last-year's chard (saved for the seed crop).

Below is some early garlic that we sacrificed make room for beans.  Allia and legumes don't do well together.  I'm not sure if the ground is tainted for the legumes, or just by removing the garlic, the beans will be just fine.  Will find out.

Early garlic

This particular bunch of garlic was not planted last Fall.  The new garlic will be saved.  These are descendents of our 2011 crop, planted Fall 2010.  Some stray cloves stayed in the ground, maybe split last year and re-emerged.  Some are also likely to be descendents of the elephant garlic from that same year, as I recall in 2011 that our elephant garlic had little tiny side bulbs, most that fell off and stayed in the ground when we harvested.

A closer look shows that we have two types of plants.  One with a gently tapered white bulb, and another with a green, spherical bulb.  This isn't how they looked when harvested, but I pulled off the outer layer.  My guess is that the spherical bulbs are the elephant garlic or another stray species, not the true garlic.

If the leaves are already too tough, I'll still chop and cook the inner stem, which is the beginning of the scape, which would have emerged in a few weeks...had we let them live.